TIP Changes and Improvements

The New Episode Player

I looked around to see whether I could find a good audio player for my website that works on desktops and mobile phones and couldn’t find anything that looked really good. Then I remembered that I have enough skills to build this sort of thing myself, so that’s what I’ve done. I hammered everything out in a bit less than a day. It’s very colourful and it works alongside existing technology. It’s not riddled with code that runs to slow things down, to spy on you, or anything like that. It’s simple, straight to the point, and it works.

Here’s a look at it. You’re looking at the embeddable versions that I’ll be posting to my web post starting next time. The little widget below will always show the very latest podcast episode.

﻿﻿﻿

As I’ve said, it was cobbled together in less than a day, and there are a few things I would have liked to add, but haven’t, yet.

What Does It Do?

Listen to TIP while you browse. Listen to me blab while you check your mail, while you look at pictures of food, cats, or porn, while you work really hard for money to pay your bills. It’s really handy for people who don’t touch iTunes if they don’t have to (like me).

Download the files when your browser doesn’t give you an option. Some browsers, such as Vivaldi and Brave, give you an easy-to-use download option right on the audio player. Unfortunately, some don’t, so I’ve added a download building.

Works on all the new fancy browsers. I’ve tested it on the many browsers I like to use. It works out really nicely. You can listen to it using your phone, your laptop, your gaming console, pretty much any browser that supports HTML5.

Almost easy feedback. Links are provided for quick commenting and reading the web blog post for the episode. You won’t see it on the widget above, but there are two other buttons that do this.

What It Doesn’t Do Yet

It doesn’t show information that’s found on the feeds, such as what the episode is about. Basically, all that stuff is still read by iTunes, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or anything else you have reading my feeds. It’s totally separate from everything else. We’ll get there and we’ll find a place to put it so that we don’t clutter up your device.

No going forward to the next episode. I really can’t see how anybody would want to listen to someone talk longer than 45-60 minutes, but if that’s your thing, I’m going to make a player for multiple episodes.

It doesn’t give reach-arounds. No instant pleasure. Sorry.

What Will It Do?

Autoplay options. Nothing upsets me more than to click on something and be bombarded by sound (especially like my current podcast intro). Autoplay is enabled at the moment, but I’ll add an option for you turn that off using cookies.

Even easier feedback. Links are great, but I’d like to see something built in but I’m going to have to integrate it with WordPress to do that.

The Idiologic Podcast Episode Guide

It’s like an electronic magazine that no one asked for. Not really. Let me explain:

Have you cared enough yet to know what’s coming up? Or perhaps you’re just curious about what’s already happened and want to catch up on a few things? The episode guide is pretty great for that. I started designing it earlier than everything else, so it’s not really looking too nice at the moment, but it works and it does what it’s supposed to do. The new player and the guide work perfectly together.

It gives you quick access to the things that the player does, but it’s like a huge list of episodes. OK, so it’s not so huge yet, but maybe it’ll get there, right?

What’s nice about the guide is that it shows you what I’m planning for future episodes, you know, approximate dates of recordings and postings. There are a few things you can do with it:

This product isn’t really finished, but as I said, it does its job (mostly).

Braving It

You’ll notice some advertisements for the Brave browser (like the one above–it’s a bit ugly though).

I’d be lying if I wasn’t getting something out of it. If you download, install, and use it, I get a few Basic Attention Tokens which is like a cryptocurrency that I can give to Brave-verified websites that I visit. I am Brave-verified as well, so if you throw me a token, I’d be quite a bit grateful for it. I think it’s a really great way to help support the sites and people I like!

Brave Verified!

The Brave browser is a good browser. Seriously, I don’t get a thing for talking nicely about it, but it’s the browser I am using right now. One of the things I want to do in the future is to disable the ads and mentions of the Brave browser if you already use it. Plus, you’ll get some extra goodies too if you send me a screenshot of you supporting me with the browser. Sounds good?